This is Busted Pencils, fully-ledded education talk.
Here are your hosts, Dr. Tim Slecker and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci,
educated educators talking education.
Yes, it is Busted Pencils fully-ledded education talk,
educated educators talking education.
Wednesday classes in session.
Johnny Lupinacci, good to see you, my friend.
How are you?
It's good, man.
It's always a good day of teaching when we get together
and then at the end of the day have great conversations
about education.
So I couldn't be happier to be here.
Tim, man, one of my favorite partnerships,
one of my most favorite resources as a teacher
and as a teacher, educator, always rethinking schools,
winning doubt.
And I'm thinking, what can I do or how can I be better teacher
or, you know, how can I teach certain topics that are really important to me
and most often so important to my students' lives,
rethinking schools.
And so excited about our guests tonight and super excited about,
you know, the publication, transgender,
justice in schools.
It is just a rock and book.
My students are loving it.
The teachers I work with absolutely have found it to be invaluable.
So Tim, I couldn't be more excited for our segment today.
I'm telling you about it too, man.
I am excited.
And as you point out, Johnny, thanks for, you know,
making sure everybody realizes that partnership with rethinking schools,
busted pencils, because man, you say it's the go-to resource.
When you're thinking, wait, I need to, I need,
I need a way to imagine something that's different.
It's like, hey, guarantee you rethinking schools is your resource,
resource to go to.
Hey, John, I want to just jump right in there.
He is a high school science teacher in Denver, Colorado,
a first generation Chinese American, Canadian,
and a proud transgender man who uses, he, him, pronouns.
He is a recipient of the 2021,
any a human and civil rights award
and the 2020 Teaching Tolerance Award for Excellence in Teaching.
He's also the co-founder of the Colorado chapter
of the transgender non-binary educators network.
That's 10 and actively trains teachers nationwide
on creating inclusive biology curricula.
Welcome to busted pencils.
Sam Long, Sam, what's happening, our friend?
Hi, thanks for having me.
I just had a nice day at school as well.
I'm really happy to be invited to join you on the podcast today.
Well, we appreciate you stopping by and spending some time with us.
We've said we've, we've had this partnership
with rethinking schools now for going on six years.
And so to always bring the authors and the,
and the great teachers that are doing that work for rethinking schools
is just something Johnny and I look forward to every time
we have this, this, this segment.
You're the latest, but Johnny referenced the book,
but you also have diversity is what makes it interesting
to study living things currently in rethinking schools.
Sam, I got some prepared questions,
but jump into it.
Tell us about the topic here specifically
in that rethinking schools article diversity.
That's what makes it interesting.
And I know Johnny Lupinati is going to have some questions
because he is always pushing on that diversity button.
Sam.
Yeah, so diversity when it comes to biology,
which is teaching about living things, human non-human living things.
And the article in rethinking schools,
it came out of my wish to share with other science teachers.
Here's a new way that you can think about diversity traditionally
in science and especially in medicine.
Any body or being that's different is just being classified
is that's pathological.
You're outside of the norm, that's bad.
We should figure out what's wrong with you
and make you more like what's average or normal.
But that's not the only way that we can look at living things.
We can look at variation as something interesting,
something to be learned about.
Darwin named variation as necessary
in order for natural selection to take place.
So that's very different from any view in science
that says something that's variant is something that's bad
or abnormal in some way.
For me, I'm a transgender man and an out trans teacher
since the first year I've been teaching.
So I couldn't go into my biology classes and teach that,
okay, there's only men and women,
there's only XX and XY chromosomes
and anything else outside of that either doesn't exist
or is not worth learning about.
I couldn't say that to my own students that already knew
that my story and my identity was more diverse than that.
So it started out of just how am I going to teach authentically
to my own students.
Then after a couple of years,
I got some positive feedback from students,
students saying, I wish that we had learned about this earlier.
I wish that we would talk more about human variation in science.
They didn't get a lot of chances to do that.
And so the article diversity is what makes it interesting
to study living things was my kind of a debut
to try to show teachers another way of looking at variation
and a way that interest students who might not typically show
a strong interest in science if you show a connection
to social identities and you show a connection
to diversity as an interesting thing.
They might show more interested in science
if it's framed in that way.
Johnny Lupinacci, I know you got some questions.
Well, I mean, more than just questions.
I know, right.
Appreciate the work that you do.
Sam, appreciate that work that you're doing to say,
hey, diversity is so much more.
Even then what we often refer to when we're talking about diversity,
not only what scientific community is teaching us
about our limited historical view on gender.
It's not just even limited, highly problematic and exclusionary
and harmful to the diversity of ways we not only identify,
but we exist.
So it's really so helpful to hear a science teacher
and you saying this like, hey, as learners together,
we're paying attention to the best evidence we have
for the information that we have around diversity
being a condition of difference upon which everything exists.
It is the fabric of all of our existence
and to limit that and only understand, say, for example,
our gender identities as male or female has been debunked,
not only by science, but by communities of people who say,
we are evidence of something very different.
So I love how you introduce our listeners
and I can only imagine in your classroom
that you really get into that.
And so Sam, tell us a little bit more about teaching,
about teaching science, and about like really covering diversity
in this really deep and authentic way.
Sure.
Well, when we want to classify something in science,
we need to ask what's the purpose of classifying things.
We're only going to classify in ways that are useful in gathering data
and seeing patterns.
So we might start by gathering students' knowledge.
Most students know that there's something different
about the X and Y chromosomes with men and women.
They don't know why that affects your physical development.
They don't know whether that has anything to do with gender identity.
But it looks like it's a useful way to classify things
because if you take like XX mammals in any species
and the ones that are XY, they do seem to,
most cases, have some different features.
So that's a classification that could be useful.
But we can't be so careless as to think that this tells you everything about a person.
Whether somebody has a Y chromosome or not,
that they might tell us whether they're high risk of inheriting color blindness
and genetics.
But it's not going to tell us how they identify.
It's not going to even guarantee that they have testes or ovaries.
There are other parts in development.
There's a really complex pathway of sex development in humans
and for other species as well.
So I try to bring my students more toward that complex side of sex and gender.
I try to, I mostly teach ninth grade and many teachers are concerned
maybe like, are they going to understand this?
Are they going to understand that there's XX and XY?
But you can have XY or XYY or just one X chromosome.
But I really felt that that's something that students should be learning.
We shouldn't tell them the generalization.
We should show them the complexity first.
It gets them interested.
It gets them thinking.
Is it useful to categorize these things?
Is it useful to say that there's two sexes in humans
when there's people that have chromosomal variations
and hormonal variations beyond that?
Is it useful to say men should get a prostate cancer screening
when you really mean anybody with a prostate no matter how you identify
should probably get that screening?
Stan, when you did that there like that,
anybody with a prostate and you make that reference too in the articles,
you know, instead of people with ovaries as opposed to women,
and using that terminology,
my guess is that students, although ninth graders,
holy crap, you've got to have some incredibly wild conversations in there.
But I wonder this though too,
a little bit, when a student, a ninth grader goes home and says,
you know, Mr. Long,
what's talking to us?
And he kind of put forward that maybe we should refer to people
with a prostate, people with ovaries.
And, you know, has there ever been a time where a parent has said,
you know, hey, Mr. Long, you know,
we're having a little of a tough time with this.
And if so, if you can talk about that,
or if how any teacher right now who's listening to the show saying,
well, I want to dig into this the way Sam, Johnny and Tim are talking,
I'm worried though.
Help them understand how to address that worry
because we know it's a real concern,
particularly in 2024,
the culture wars fully ablaze in.
Definitely.
And so the language of, say, somebody with ovaries,
that's going to be,
it's going to be really useful if we're talking about the production of sex cells.
Someone that with ovaries is going to produce a different quantity
and a size of sex cell compared to someone with testes.
It is not given as a replacement for a broad replacement
for the word woman or man.
So we might be talking about people with ovaries in that lesson
about meiosis and the production of sex cells.
But when we're dealing with maybe in the next unit,
talking about genetic inheritance,
it's going to be more,
most genes are not inherited through an X chromosome.
If it were a sex linked trait,
we would be talking about people with two X chromosomes
versus people with one,
because that's what's going to make the difference as to how many copies
of that gene you can carry.
And so by try to make it clear to students,
this is a functional piece of language that we're using.
And we do need to be precise and say what we mean,
rather than use sex as a shortcut that's going to be insufficient
in describing the processes we're talking about.
And I have had families ask questions saying,
I didn't know we were learning about gender in your science class
or I didn't know that you,
this would be talking about transgender.
These, usually,
I feel the concern comes out of,
they don't know what we're going to be talking about.
They, as an adult, may have not learned the complex science
or may not have made that connection that complexity is in every aspect
of science.
And so why would we treat issues of sex
any differently from other aspect of science?
Typically, the idea that some of my students might think,
oh, he's Mr. Long saying people with testes
that must mean that maybe we're not allowed to say men
in this class, which is definitely not the case.
So say men, anytime we're talking about a group of people
that are men,
but I draw their attention to the function of the language.
If we were to say,
oh, men are 90% likely,
90% more likely than women to be colorblind.
First, would anyone that hears us that they wouldn't really know
are we talking about just people who identify as men,
people who are legally men, people who have testes,
what do you mean by that when you say that?
And they wouldn't be understanding the scientific basis.
And so in that case, we would say someone with one X chromosome
more likely to inherit colorblindness,
because that's the chromosome in which you're carrying
the colorblindness gene.
Oh, I love this, Sam.
It's so inspiring because we talk a lot here on Busta Pencils
and I think a lot of us radical educators
are excited about this generation of young people
who are pushing their teachers to be better,
better scientists, better writers, better all these things.
And I'm just curious, you've mentioned it a little bit
the engagement of your students and the value they see in this.
But tell us a little bit about how they inspire you
and what you're seeing in this future generation that's coming out.
I was really nervous the first time I was planning out
this upcoming lesson.
I knew that the base material had this felt really uncomfortable stuff
about intersex, where it just treated it as it disease
and treated it as something to be regarded as abnormal.
So I broke through my notes, how am I planning to present it?
How am I planning to respond to the questions from the students?
And I actually, well, I guess I was so nervous that I,
I knew I wanted to do it, but I was so worried that there
would be criticism from students that after I said all my stuff,
I, no one said anything, the students just kind of nodded,
but I said that, thank you.
Because I, it felt so nervous presenting this,
something that felt so personal to me,
and not someone who's intersex,
and I explained the difference between intersex and transgender.
But after that first lesson,
student was stayed after class and said,
I'm glad that you taught us about this.
I've taken other biology classes,
and this is the first time any issue of sex, gender,
and sexuality has come up, and the students said,
well, I'm bisexual.
I'm really glad that it's something that we can learn about.
Maybe we can learn more about what we talk about evolution,
because he wanted to talk about what's the basis of sexuality
in human evolution.
And so there's always students in each class
who have that interest.
Sometimes it's students who, they're just glad
that the science lesson is bringing in something
about social identity, something for them to,
so empathy about and to find patterns in.
And there's students who are openly or not openly
transgender themselves, students who have friends,
are allies, have family members who are directly impacted
by the accuracy of language we use.
A lot of students or teachers that I work with,
they express that they want to talk about parents
and relationships in a family in a way that includes
the different kinds of families that we have,
not just when it comes to gender,
they're someone having two moms, for example,
but they're students being raised by their grandparents,
students in foster home,
and many teachers and many students to recognize the need
for language that actually describes how our society is
and the variation that we see.
Many students want to learn it right the first time
and not have me teach them some huge generalization
that needs to be added on.
It would be kind of, to a student that like understands
intersex and variations,
it would be like teaching students that there's 20 letters
in the alphabet and then say,
well, there's six more after that.
Why would you do that?
Damn, man, the complexity,
the inspiration that comes into, again,
just the biology situating it like that
as a science teacher there and bringing that in.
I love that part,
but I want to also give you an opportunity
to talk a little bit to about 10,
the chapter of transgender non-binary educators network
that you founded.
Tell our listener a little bit about that organization,
you founded it, how, you know,
what was the inspiration there,
and what's some of the work that the 10 is up to right now?
Well, the transgender educators network,
mostly North American based lists of a group
who started by a friend of mine,
Harper Keenan, in around 2015.
And a couple of years later,
I found that I connected with enough educators
that either were teaching in Colorado
or had recently relocated to Colorado
to continue teaching.
We started the Colorado chapter, a co-10.
And first, just for as a means of pure support
and a way of connecting with each other,
we were all navigating similar issues in regards to
how open we want to be about our identity,
how does our administration approach that
to they see that as is that a strength
when you have somebody that wants to share their story
and be vulnerable and model that to the community?
Or is they see as a liability?
Is this another reason why parents might complain?
And there's a whole spectrum of those experiences.
A lot of transgender educators want to share
about their identity in some way.
And mostly that they wanted to know that they would be supported
as any other teacher.
Nobody wants to be seen for their liabilities
or their weaknesses.
They want to be known for their strengths
and what is unique that they can bring to their team
and their school.
So a big piece of the work was increasing our visibility.
I don't think most principals even have that on their radar.
I could have a teacher who's transgender.
I could have a teacher who's,
I didn't know they're transgender and all of a sudden
they want to transition.
So we hosted some panel discussions
at some local education-related events.
And our visibility, aside from, say, to other educators,
it did a lot for students to see that there's trans teachers.
Maybe there's not in my school, but there's trans teachers
that are in front of students every day.
And even if we do nothing else,
we are a living example that's possible to be a healthy
and happy trans adult.
Most of the time in schools, you don't see that.
You see students, you hear about students,
you hear about how at-risk transgender youth
are and you hear about all the ways in which they're not
being properly served by their schools sometimes.
And even adults might not realize there's trans adults.
The only reason they might not be as visible
and as present in our education settings
is something is stopping them from entering education.
Something is stopping them or pushing them out
or making it difficult for them to be a teacher.
That's excellent, Sam.
Hey, listener, if you're vibing with this,
because we certainly are, this is excellent stuff.
Remember, if you have a comment or question,
you can always call or text us at 608557-8577.
Before we leave, though, Sam, tell our listeners
where they can get more of this.
You referenced your article.
I talked about the transgender justice book,
but let our listeners know where they can connect
with your organization and they can learn more
from your wise ways and your courageous teaching.
Definitely.
So if you're a transgender educator,
a trans or non-binary,
or want to receive support from the group
then transeducators.com is where you can join the list serve.
If you're a science teacher,
a teacher about families, bodies,
or reproduction in any way, including health,
you can find a lot of ready-made resources
at genderinclusivebiology.com
and a way to directly connect with us as well.
Hey, that's excellent.
Listeners, we love it.
We love that you're listening, Sam.
We are inspired by your teaching and the hard work
that all the folks at rethinking schools are doing.
So check out all those resources.
This is busted pencils.
Educated educators, talking education.
Thanks for busting pencils with us.
It's been a pleasure to thanks.
Our thanks to Sam Long,
and as we end every episode,
here is your moment of zin.
We don't have to engage in grand heroic actions
to participate in the process of change.
Small acts when multiplied by millions of people
can transform the world.
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